


Words That Fall Away

by Pontmercyingtilthecowscomehome



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Cassian Andor-centric, Cassian Backstory, Character Study, Diaspora, Gen, POV Cassian Andor, Space Spanish, based in part on doing the math for Cassian's age and being confused, canon compliant character death, disney invented a child soldier hero and we all need to come to terms with that in our own way, hopeful but canon compliant ending, sad lonely boy is sad and lonely
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-07
Updated: 2018-12-07
Packaged: 2019-09-13 09:39:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16890123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pontmercyingtilthecowscomehome/pseuds/Pontmercyingtilthecowscomehome
Summary: Scenes from Cassian's life, and thoughts on how a childhood spent fighting for the rebellion shaped him. Full of Feels, and a sprinkling of space Spanish.





	Words That Fall Away

**Author's Note:**

> Comments always welcome, my Spanish is family-taught so it might not be the same as yours :) We can just call it Festian Spanish if there's discrepancies. I really enjoyed imagining Fest's culture, based on the fact it was a cold climate in old EU.

A man steps in front of the little fire Cassian has made, under the overhanging ruins that provide some shelter from the snow that always falls in this season on Fest. The man has stepped right through the ghosts that he obviously can't see, and begins to speak in a language Cassian can barely understand.  He does capture bits of it, the way he used to catch snowflakes on his tongue, when he was only a little younger. When he had a home. The man speaks of rebellion and fighting and a lot of things that Cassian does like the sound of, even if he doesn't know all the words.

“Join us,” the man says in Galactic Basic, which sounds so heavy, so cold to his young ears. The man too seems cold, in a uniform he doesn’t know, with an accent he doesn’t recognize. Cassian will learn his name later. He’ll learn so many things, later, and forget so much more. “We can make you a hero.”

He’s young enough to believe that.

He’s young enough to take the offered hand without fear, and be led onto a ship.

He’s young enough to forget to look back at his home world for what will be the last time.

Instead, he only looks ahead, holds his breath when the stars go long, streaking out into oblivion. He only wonders for a moment, if his family will be able to find him, wherever he’s going. But then, he decides, his family are here, in the stars. They can follow him anywhere. He’s never alone.

That’s what his papá said, before he left for the last time.  _ Sé un buen niño. Mantenga encendido el fuego. _

It’s how they leave, when they leave, on Fest. They don’t say goodbye, that word he’d heard the others say to him. There’s nothing good about leaving. Not unless there’s something to come back to.

He thinks he’ll come back to Fest.

He thinks he’ll never need to use the word goodbye.

* * *

 

The first thing they make him do is wash behind his ears.  Cut his hair. Put on clean clothes. For being a rebellion, it seems like there are just as many rules as there were at school, when he remembered to go to school. There had been rules in his home too, when he’d had one. But those rules had always been said with a smile, and any infractions of them were simply met with a kiss on the forehead, a little shake of a wise elder’s head. If a rule had seemed unfair at home, there were plenty of tías y tíos to go to for a second or third opinion. He’d never known a rule he couldn't’ charm his way out of.

When he’d had a home.

He can’t quite remember the word for home. Not anymore.

Now, though, he has a cause. A reason to fight. He tells himself that’s why it’s okay there’s rules, for now. That the rules are there to protect him, so he can grow up to be a hero.

The next rule he learns, is that his name is a forbidden one. They call him by a different name, they tell him he’s nine.

He’s pretty sure he’s only seven. 

But nine it is, because that’s the rule. 

He’s heard someone say that he  _ needs  _ to be ten to join the Academy, that he’ll just be small for his age, that, Force-willing, they’ll be able to make this work.

Soon, he’ll learn how important it is to hear things, how eavesdropping will save his life over and over again.  Soon, he’ll find out how much of the Rebellion is just praying that this will work.

Whatever the  _ this  _ is will change, depending on the mission, of course. Sometimes it’s a ship. Sometimes it’s a con.

Sometimes, it’s the will to take another step.

But for now, he doesn’t know to pray to anyone, because all he’s had for a year is himself and the ghosts of his family. Ghosts that certainly wouldn’t want him to have a new name. How will they know to find him, if they come looking for their son, their  _ chiquito. _

He doesn’t realize it then, but the words he grew up hearing are already different in his head, already fading away, replaced with the clipped formality of Galactic Basic.

Already, the words he tries to teach them are pushed aside. His commanding officers, as they’ve told him to call them, have no time for words from a language used by so few planets. Not when they’re trying to unite all the planets under the banner of peace.

They tell him about that banner, about that mission, and he nods. He’s willing to do anything to help, even to pretend he is both older and braver than he is. The lessons start. He learns new words, both translations for words like  _ zapatos _ and  _ cama _ , words for the things they’ve given him that he used to have, and words that he never knew before. Treaty. Insurgency. Covert.

What he doesn’t learn are the words for  _ besos,  _ for  _ canción _ , for  _ chimenea _ .

That last word gets him in trouble when one of the soldiers finds him lighting a fire outside. He just wants to see the flames, and feel warm. Even though this planet is hotter than home, with so much less stone, he doesn’t feel warm. Not without his…

The words fall away from him as swiftly as booted feet stamp out the fire.

He learns another word that day: consequences.

Every choice, he’s told, has consequences.

So he makes a choice.

He makes them promise that when training is over, he can use his name again. His full name.

He rattles it off to them again, and then, the names of all those he was descended from. It’s the way he was taught his name.

_ Cassian Jeron Andor. Hijo de Jeron Odas Andor. Hijo de... _

They tell him he’s Joreth.

It’s close enough to his papá's name that he decides to take it. After all, he’s training to be a hero, and no one was more a hero than his papá.

* * *

 

Months later, they send him to school. He thinks this is where he’ll be a hero. He doesn’t realize this is where he’ll learn how villains are made. Because it’s a school made of shades of grey and black. It’s a school where the only subject taught is obedience, and the only way to graduate is to surrender one’s free will. It’s a school where everyone has the same hair, the same cold face, the same iron-straight posture.    
He styles his dark brown hair like them. Parts it on the left.

His father used to part his down the center.

His father’s hair was dark like his. The other students all have hair like burnt grass, pale yellow and as sickly looking as he finds their complexions. His appearance already makes him a target, his small size turns him into prey. At least, that’s what they all think, until he proves that to fight him is to step into the flames. He’s small, but he is quick, and unlike them, with their little luxuries left in their dorm rooms and their handsome allowances provided by fathers who gained the money through weapons-dealing or the other ills of the Empire, he has nothing to lose.

After all, he’s already lost his name.

He teaches himself not to smile next. He learns the cold face with emotionless eyes the same way he learns the lessons offered each day. Every lesson, every class, of course, boils down to the same basic principle.

_ Long live the Empire. _

_ Death to those who defy. _

_ Power is given to those who deserve it. _

He doesn’t believe a word of it. They do. It is enough to scare him into pressing the comm button, the one he’s been taught the code words for. 

Code words are their own language, in a way. They too slip away after use.

“I need new boots,” he whispers, the words that are supposed to free him, to rescue him, to… what was that word again? Extradite him.

Instead, he hears, “we won’t be able to send them for a few months.”

Months. He knows that word. His papá said it, to his mamá. They spoke in Basic, when they talked of matters they didn’t want their  _ mijo  _ to hear.

Odd that he still knows the word, but not as a meaning, just as a pang in his heart.

Papá had said, “I’ll be home in a few months. Keep the fire warm for me.”

Mamá had promised.

And Cassian had promised, even if they’d called him Joreth, he’d promised to do his task here. So, he’d just have to learn how to. 

He doesn’t know yet, and won’t know for some time, that’s the real skill he learns on Carida. To complete the mission, no matter what.

So, he puts his head down, and begins to ignore his papás ghost. That’s one thing he hadn’t told the Alliance. That he knew the place’s name, if not its location on a star chart. That he knew his papá's blood had stained one of the pristine walls he walks past every day.

That sometimes, when he wakes in the middle of the night and wants to scream, because he doesn’t remember life before this Academy, he hears his papá sing to him. He's not afraid after that. He knows he is doing the work his papá died doing. The good work. The work of a gardener, helping prune away the weeds to let things bloom. His papá had been a gardener, in the short seasons of summer that Fest had given them.   


Cassian had wanted to be a gardener too, long before he'd wanted to be a hero.

* * *

 

The posture of the villains comes last, but it’s easier the day he gets his first uniform. The shiny jet-black tall boots pinch. _No_ **.** It is tall, jet-black boots. The way to place the adjectives, that matters a great deal, if one wishes to fit in. And he must do more than fit in. He must become, to all of them in school with him, become the lie to everyone but his own heart.

The trousers puff out in a way he’d have found humorous, if he could remember how to laugh. But it’s the jacket that teaches him to square his shoulders when he wears it. It’s the same cut, the same shade of grey his teachers wear.

His teachers, who are permitted to punish students with any tool they deem necessary.   
Every action has a consequence.

So he lets the jacket cut away the feline slouch he’d learned when he lived on the run and hid out in the wreckage of an old battlefield. He lets the teachers praise his quick grasp of material, and he lets his accent disappear.  He speaks Galactic Basic better than his classmates now, and collects other languages the way some older ones collect lovers. Every one of them a tool to help him be more useful, when he returns to home base. Every one of them something that could turn him into a hero.

He doesn’t realize yet, how different the words  _ home _ and  _ home base _ truly are.

He doesn’t realize no one will keep the fire burning for a spy, not even one who is only a child.

He doesn’t realize he won’t be a child for very long.

The ghost who sings to him, perhaps, does, and kisses his forehead. But he no longer knows the meaning to the words the ghost sings, nor the words that echo in his heart. They’re no more than a melody to him.

He knows six languages now, and none of them are the ones his family used.

The night he poisons the headmaster is the first time he whispers the words of his home in two years. It doesn’t matter what he says, he tells himself later. It would have been foolish to feel pity for the Headmaster of an Imperial Military Academy.

Even more foolish to think that would be the last time death came at his hands.

When he returns to the base, he’s rewarded with new boots, and a new name. He writes it down twenty times, then burns the paper.

He’s learned to hide his fire, by now.

He’s learned a great deal.

* * *

 

They send him to a place called Havoc Outpost next, and they teach him about code-breaking, since he already has shown his lockpicking skills. Before he learns anything more of the outpost, he’s sent away again. Another base. Another skill to learn. Every time, he’s only there long enough to master the task at hand. Never long enough to make a friend, or even a fireplace. He’s tried, on a few bases, to stack a ring of stones into a circle, and find material to burn. But there’s always another guard. Always someone warning him of the risks of a fire.

As if he doesn’t know about risk.

He just wants to be warm.

He can’t remember the last time he was warm, not even when he takes a mission to Tatooine, and sandy winds burn his face. It’s no worse a burn than the marks a different poison leaves on his hand when his task is done.

It’s no worse than the blood that he sees staining his hands, when he wakes at night.

What’s worse is not waking to the feeling of the ghosts of his family. Instead, he wakes to the ghosts of those he killed, and the fears of those that are in the missions ahead.

By the time they say he’s twenty, although he’s rather sure he’s older than that, older than any of them, older than any years can mark, he’s stopped dreaming.

By the time they say he’s twenty-six, and all he knows is that he counts his life in days eked out in desperate missions, he’s stopped sleeping.

* * *

 

They take him to another base. He’s back to eavesdropping, after all these years. He presses against the wall, listening, listening. The same way he used to listen to the ghosts of his family. Now, it is his commanding officers he listens for.

“We’ve expanded so many resources on him. His training took a decade. We can’t lose that.”

“He’s the best agent for the job.”

“He’s the best agent, period.” The first officer sighs. “We’ll never be able to recruit another one and train them as well as him.”

“We have students at the Academy even now.”

“None like him. None with his other skills.  He’s too valuable.”

He understands then, that he’s not a hero. Maybe he never will be. He’s just a  _ resource.  _ A tool of the Rebellion. It doesn't matter to him. He still wants to help.

He can’t remember what his papá called the tools he'd used, but he does remember the feel of his hands in nearly frozen soil revealed by a shovel, helping him plant a garden for the two months where the frost broke. He does remember pressing seeds into the ground, hoping they’ll blossom into flowers, though his papá warns him that it might be a quick growing season. A short summer.

He insists on the seeds’ placement, and his muddy fingers press the tiny little spheres deep into the ground. He whispers something to the baby plants, when they sprout. Something that now, his mind translates for him. It’s been too long, and home is too far away, for his memories to remain the way he’d spoken them.

_ Grow, _ he’d whispered.  _ Grow big and strong. I believe in you. Bloom like the sun.  _

But he’d never seen the flowers bloom. Maybe they had. Maybe the troopers’ flamethrowers hadn’t reached that tiny garden, beyond the warm house, with the big fireplace inside. The fireplace that even now he can see his family gathered around.

He shivers.

He is so cold.

Always, always, cold.

* * *

 

The next mission, he uses his own name. He’s had more false ones than he’s had years of life, and he is more than tired. He is bone-weary, a seed that keeps trying to break through frozen soil, and never can. He can’t bloom, not now. Not ever. His task is to remain in the shadows, unseen, unknown.   
He is a ghost, like the rest of his family. But unlike them, he is alive.

And so, he gives her his name, the only thing he has. He doesn’t know yet that he’ll offer his name to all of them, all of the family he will make his, the friendships forged in a fire beyond any he could dream of.

In that moment, all he knows is the mission.

_ This is Captain Cassian Andor. Rebel Intelligence. _

He’s not a hero. Neither is she. And both of them, he thinks, are haunted by fathers. Only hers isn’t dead.

Not yet.

Every action has a consequence.

Every action is a choice.

Things fall apart, and things fall together. He’s warm now, warm with hope, with courage, with belief. All too soon, he’s putting on that grey uniform again, those black boots. Only this time, he doesn't notice how they pinch. There’s a mission ahead. There’s a chance, however small, that he might be a hero.   
Not just a tool. Not a resource. 

A hero.

Every action is a choice.

_ Una flor se cristaliza en sus ojos,  _ the ghosts say, as they watch on that shore. He’s come back to them, in a way, come back to the courage they raised him to have.

Every action is a choice.

Every seed can bloom, if the pressure and the light and the timing is right. This is the right time, he decides, as Scarif comes into view. The right place. Now, unlike then, he takes in every moment. 

There’s no time to think, at the end of all things. But he is warm, so warm, in her arms. It turns out a fire can be a person, if they burn hot enough. If they believe enough. He is twenty-six years old, and his life has been lived for the Rebellion, but his death will be for the future. Hope is a burning hearth, and this is the match upon the tinder.

_ Keep the fire burning. Give me something to come home to.  _

He chooses, then, and knows that when he comes to sit with his family,  _ cuando sentados junto al fuego, _ he will be able to greet them in the language they speak, he will tell them his name, and that he, in the end, was a hero.


End file.
